


all your cards on the table

by sagemb



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Friends to Lovers, M/M, Post-Canon, Slow Burn, some inter-colleague relationships that should be reported to HR if dreamshare HR existed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-20
Updated: 2018-02-20
Packaged: 2019-03-21 13:44:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13742163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sagemb/pseuds/sagemb
Summary: Post-Inception, Arthur tries to figure out how to move forward. Eames offers him a business partnership.





	all your cards on the table

**Author's Note:**

> Written for i_reversebang 2018. Inspired by nesel's lovely [art](https://imgur.com/LvsYxGw) (thanks for letting me run wild with it!). Link to masterpost will be posted soon.

After inception comes a crossroads. Arthur isn’t entirely sure that he realizes its full magnitude, doesn’t know how he could even begin to try.

Here they are: Ariadne going back to classes and dreaming natural dreams at night, Dom seeing his children for the first time in two years, Yusuf mixing his sedatives for the washed-out dreamers in the basement den, Saito taking his throne at the top of the newly un-duopolized energy industry. It all feels like the end of an era.

And him and Eames, well, they move on. They’re young men with nothing, no one, to go back to (their recently inflated bank accounts, maybe distantly affectionate parents and siblings) but they themselves are simply in a moment between jobs. The strings behind Arthur are finally cut. There are a lot of open options for both of them.

So it's like this: Arthur hasn't seen Eames before this since the Zolkin job in St. Petersburg, and he'd told himself then that he wasn't going to think too hard about him, so when they part ways at immigration in the LAX airport, Arthur is only cursing himself a little for not saying anything to Eames.

But Arthur’s life, like it always is if you cut the shit and sweep away all the pretenses, is not up to him. This goes pretty simply: he walks into the lobby of the hotel where he booked a reservation before getting on the plane and finds Eames sitting at the bar.

After Arthur checks in, he joins him, because he’s stupid as shit. And, he’s realizing, very easy to loosen up with a couple drinks. Or maybe it’s just that, for the first time in two years, when he asks himself _how did I get here_ , he doesn't see Mal, or Phillipa, or baby James. Or even Dom. Just an elevator and a remote detonator, an endless week on the first level. Just an airplane, then a taxi, then a hotel, and now Eames.

They only just get to his room before he’s being pressed against the door; he seeks out Eames’ mouth hungrily with his own, hands already working at the buttons on Eames’ shirt—

There's a voice in his ear: _darling, darling, you were brilliant, you're gorgeous_ — _fuck, my God_ —

They barely make it to the bed.

In the morning Eames waits until Arthur is awake to leave, kissing him quickly on the temple before grabbing his suitcase and slipping out the door. No hard feelings.

Arthur stands on the balcony afterwards, smoking a cigarette and feeling the wind seep through the fabric of his thin, unbuttoned shirt, ghost the bare skin of his chest. The November air is unusually cold for SoCal.

He doesn’t expect to hear from Eames for a while.

 

* * *

 

Four days later, Arthur gets a phone call from him.

“Job in New York,” he says. “Client’s SCMI Corp. I’m extracting, not sure if a forge is necessary yet. Do you want it?”

“Sure, ” Arthur replies, extricating himself from the duvet of his hotel bed. “Why not?”

There’s a beat of surprised silence on the other end. “You don’t even know what the job’s about.”

 _I trust your judgement,_ Arthur thinks, and says, “I don’t think you can screw me over any more than Cobb did, Eames.”

“Fair enough.” Another beat of silence. “I’m sending you the information. I’ll meet you in a week.”

 

* * *

 

Eames picks him up from JFK in a grey Honda and says, “Safe flight?”

“I’m in one piece, aren’t I,” Arthur replies dryly.

They drift into a warm, comfortable silence once Eames merges onto the parkway; Arthur lets his head fall back against the seat, exhaling. From outside comes the roaring of highway traffic, the high yawning of an airplane overhead.

“Doesn’t this bring back memories,” says Eames.

Queens, their first job together: the first time they’d met was in a warehouse in Richmond Hill. Then, too, it had been winter, and Eames had worn an earthy orange parka. Arthur, still sometimes forgetting that he wasn’t in black ops anymore, had been affronted by its obtrusiveness.

 _Aren’t forgers supposed to be more versatile,_ he’d said, straight to Eames’ face. _You’re about as subtle as an elephant._

 _It’s an arrogant art, mate,_ Eames had replied jovially, and pickpocketed Arthur’s wallet to buy himself a magenta-colored scarf.

In retrospect Arthur had deserved it. He’d been something of an asshole back then.

“You were such an asshole,” he tells Eames.

“I’ve still got the scarf,” Eames says, chuckling. “It’s a bloody hideous thing.”

“Asshole,” Arthur repeats.

“You were so genuinely offended, I think it’d break my heart to get rid of it.”

Arthur closes his eyes and laughs and thinks, _God fucking help me._

 

 

“You’re staying at your apartment?” asks Eames once they’ve emerged from the Midtown Tunnel into the city.

Arthur’s never told Eames about his New York apartment, but it was one of his primary stateside residences two years ago, so he’s not surprised that he knows. He’d started subletting his place in LA after a couple months on the run, but this apartment is the better furnished out of the two, and between that and the fact that he had sometimes needed a place of his own to spend a few days away from Dom just to breathe air unclouded by grief, he’d kept this one empty.

“Yeah— mind letting me drop off my luggage there before we head to the workshop? Lower East Side.”

“Not a problem,” says Eames. “We’re working out of the Lower East, actually.”

“Short commute,” Arthur quips quietly, really just so he has something to respond to Eames with, but for some reason Eames turns to look at him, smiling a little.

He stops the car in front of Arthur’s building, and Arthur deposits his suitcase in his kitchen, keeping his messenger bag with him, and grabs a Glock 17 from the safe before coming back outside.

“All right,” he says. “Let’s go.”

They pull up to an old brick building. The ground floor is a deli, Arthur notes, which means convenient lunches.

“The CFO of SCMI rented out an apartment for us,” says Eames. “It’s a shithole, but we’ve worked out of worse— Christ, I hate parallel parking— I’ll tell you everything once we’re inside. I’ve got the place mostly set up already, dunno if it’s exactly the way you like things, though— ah, here we go.” He puts the car in park and turns off the ignition.

Once inside (Eames was right— it is a shithole: so tiny only a mouse could live out of it, cheap furniture, weird dents in the walls and stained ceilings) Eames hands Arthur a manila folder, which Arthur finds oddly touching. Eames is, unlike Arthur, a man who would deal solely in verbal intel if he could.

“Client’s name is David Fraser. Same man who rented this place for us. I’ve done a basic background check on him, nothing suspicious. You might want to dig a little deeper, but he seems fine so far,” says Eames.

“I’ll do that,” Arthur says.

The job is simple, very basic corporate espionage. A one-level, two-person affair. The mark’s name is Samuel O’Connell, CFO of SCMI’s main competitor, from whom they need to extract the location and passcode to documents that are proof that he’s been embezzling millions of dollars. Almost too boring for Eames. And for Arthur, but rating a job by the level of entertainment it brings is something that, as arguably the best point man in the industry, he will deny doing for professionalism’s sake.

Arthur reads through the files for a couple of minutes, pulling out a pen to note anything he needs to review later.

“So what do you think?” asks Eames.

“That this is a hell of a lot more manageable than inception,” Arthur says. “Who’s our architect?”

Eames shrugs. “I figured we’d get to that when you arrived.”

Arthur frowns, then closes the folder with a _snap_ and glares up at Eames.

“Look, that’s why I called you so soon, yeah?” says Eames. “I only got the job the day before. I was hoping that you with your, well, exceptionally extensive list of contacts, could help me locate a suitable architect. You’re point, after all, team business is your bloody job.”

“So we’re setting up the job together?” says Arthur, straightening up to look at Eames. “We’re— what, planning the planning?”

“Precisely, darling. Fraser’s deadline isn’t for more than three months. You know that this kind of job, barring any unforeseen circumstances, really won’t take more than about three weeks.” Eames draws up a chair at the tiny kitchen table and sits down beside Arthur. Their knees knock together. “I called you in early mostly just so I won’t have to do all the logistics bollocks of assembling a team and a workspace and getting the compounds on my own.”

Which feels strangely gratifying, even though dealing with the kinds of things Eames is asking him to isn’t new to him. Even with Dom, who was in the habit of accepting the most dangerous, stupid jobs he could get his hands on without consulting Arthur, it usually fell to him to contact and vet potential architects and chemists. Mostly because Dom was too wrapped up in his own grief and guilt, kept slipping more and more after every job where Mal showed up.

But here is Eames, asking him to do his job not because he has to be a crutch, but because he’s good at it and Eames likes that, likes working with him.

“Okay,” says Arthur. “I’ll make some calls. I know a few people in the area.”

By the end of the day he’s placed an order for standard Somnacin from a chemist supplying the greater New York area and gotten confirmation from an architect in Brooklyn that she’ll be able to come into Manhattan in two days.

He informs Eames, who says, “Fast work. Lovely, darling.”

He leaves for the night feeling decently gratified, stops at a 24-hour grocery store on the way home. He cooks his first American-made dinner in months and thinks of the airport this morning, of things he’s known since he was a kid, of things he’s accumulated in the years since he’s left home.

There will be a time, Arthur thinks, decades into the future, where his first instinct when someone grabs his arm or bumps into him on the street will not be to draw his gun and pin them down knee-to-chest. He doesn’t understand how he’ll bridge the unfathomable gap between then and now. He doesn’t know what a life like that could mean; if it would mean better things than what’s here for him.

But he will have learned how to live with those things, he thinks, when a life like that comes.

 

* * *

 

Their apartment-slash-workspace is apparently Eames’ living quarters for the extent of this job, because when Arthur comes into work the next morning, he finds Eames sitting on the couch with a plate of buttered toast wearing nothing but candy-striped silk pajama bottoms and red argyle socks.

“Aren’t you cold?” Arthur asks.

Eames shrugs. “A bit. But the toast’s warm and the heat is on, at least.”

“You could have stayed in a hotel.”

“That would mean _travel time_ , darling. And at least two hundred a night to get somewhere as comfortable as here.” He takes a bite of his toast. “All things considered it’s really much better to stay here and get to work as soon as you arrive.”

“Not before you put on a shirt first,” Arthur says.

“Too distracting?”

“Too unprofessional.” He fights a smile.

“Don’t discriminate against the inked, Arthur.”

“Put the goddamn shirt on, Mr. Eames, and finish your breakfast so we can talk about how this is going to go.”

“Yes, oh fearsome point man.” Eames stumbles off to the bedroom.

Arthur turns towards the one window shared by both the living room and the kitchen and huffs a laugh.

A couple minutes later, Eames comes back into the room wearing real clothes (or as close to real as Eames’ clothes get) and says, “Right, then. Where were we?”

“I did some research last night,” Arthur says, pulling out his laptop. “Samuel O’Connell, forty-nine, been CFO for twenty-two years. Basically since the company was founded. Got a wife, Lisa, and a daughter and a son, fifteen and thirteen respectively. From what I can see of their collective social media presence, he’s pretty devoted to the family, no outside affairs or anything. Wholesome guy on the outside.”

“I'm suitably impressed,” Eames says.

“Your condescension, as always, Mr. Eames,” says Arthur. “Et cetera.”

“You’re the only person I’ve ever known to use the phrase ‘et cetera’ out loud, you know.”

“I use the words that fit my needs,” he says, shrugging. “So do you.”

“And what part are _you_ playing, darling?”

“I do my job,” Arthur says. “Speaking of.”

“Yes. Well, talk to me about his experience with dreamshare. Is there a possibility that he’s militarized? I know it’s early stages still, but don’t try and tell me that wasn’t one of the first things you looked into.”

He doesn’t flinch. “His communication records say no, but he’s obviously got more than one email and cell phone number. And if he’s been militarized by anyone decent, you know they wouldn’t have left a trail. So. I’ll sniff around a couple likely dreamer circles, but I’m willing to say no, he hasn’t been militarized. His habits don’t even indicate any wariness of potential extraction.”

“That's some research,” Eames says. “Did you get any sleep last night?”

“Enough to sleep well in the day, if we were to go under.”

“I doubt we will,” says Eames. “Let’s talk about strategy. Who’s the person who’s most likely to know about O’Connell’s financial improprieties?”

“Most likely? His secretary, a financial advisor or two that he trusts. Maybe his wife, but I wouldn’t bet on it.”

Eames shrugs. “All right. You got anything on people he trusts at the company?”

“I’ve got a little on his secretary. Sarah Riley, thirty-three. She’s worked for him for seven years. Here’s her Facebook page.” He turns the laptop around to face Eames.

“I need confirmation that she’s in on it. If not her, one of his advisors.” Eames leans back, closes his eyes.

“I feel like I should remind you that I’m not Saito and I don’t have the connections to get you a job that would give you access to anyone who works near O’Connell. Even if you do have references, Mr. Eames.”

“Who’s the condescending one now, darling?” Eames says. “I know. It’s okay. I’ve got a few ideas that don’t involve me being anyone else.”

“So, no forging this time around?” says Arthur.

“No forging,” Eames confirms. “This kind of extraction, we’d really just be better off going the standard route.” He looks less disappointed than Arthur would expect.

A good job to start out with in this post-inception era, all things considered.

 

* * *

 

It happens the second time just like the first, unselfconscious and without fanfare. At the end of the workday, two weeks into the job, Eames catches Arthur’s eye and raises an eyebrow. Arthur raises an eyebrow back before stepping in close to Eames.

“Could I come to your place tonight?” murmurs Eames, his breath tickling Arthur’s cheek.

“Sure.”

Kezia, their architect, who’s sitting on the couch with her sketchpad, pretends not to notice the whole thing.

Two hours later, Eames knocks on Arthur’s door. “I’ve brought dinner,” he says, appraising Arthur’s cashmere pullover and sock feet.

Arthur stares at the brown paper bag in Eames’ grasp as he lets him in. “I just cooked.”

By “just cooked” he means that as soon as he’d gotten home, he’d frantically defrosted the best cut of beef he had in the freezer and chopped up some potatoes and broccoli and made a general mess of his spice cabinet, but that wasn’t something Eames ever needed to know.

“All right,” says Eames, walking through Arthur’s living room and depositing the bag on his kitchen counter. “Pick which one you want to save for later, then.”

“What’s in there?”

“Italian. Chicken penne and baked ziti, couple of salads.”

“Fuck,” says Arthur, looking at the dishes on the counter. “Okay, give me that. I’ll bring it in for lunch tomorrow. Tonight we’re eating my goddamn food.”

Eames laughs. “Sounds like a deal, darling.”

“Beer?” Arthur pulls out two plates from the cupboard.

“Thanks.”

There’s something very flirtatious about sitting down to dinner with someone, both of you knowing that you’ll end up in bed together by the end of the night but choosing take your time about it. Nothing more than a game, he knows, but one that he can’t help enjoying.

“This could almost be a proper date,” Eames comments, and punctuates it with a swig of beer.

Arthur lets out a manufactured snort. “Is it?”

“Depends how you look at it.”

“I’m thinking that it’s whatever you want it to be,” he says carefully. Then: “It’s a steak dinner, isn’t that enough for you?”

“Quite,” Eames laughs. “Thank fuck it’s Friday. I declare a day off tomorrow. No working, it’s a bloody weekend and we’re just about done anyway.”

Arthur shrugs. “Kezia won’t be coming in, so why not.”

“Honestly thought it’d take more to convince you,” Eames says after a moment, looking half amused, half wondering.

He shrugs again. “We really don’t have much to do anymore. We could probably pull it off right now, if the timing was right.”

“Fair enough,” Eames says, because they both know that as much as Arthur’s job is about being prepared for things, it’s also about being good at improvising on the fly. “How are you going to spend your generously granted free time?”

Arthur puts a forkful of potato in his mouth, chews and says, “Watch TV or something. I don’t know. Buy a hat. It’s fucking cold.”

Grinning, Eames says, “Your ears are red when you come in every morning. It's quite adorable.”

“Shut up,” Arthur says.

“It’s a nice place you’ve got here,” Eames comments idly. “How long have you had it?”

“Four years, give or take.”

“Why the hotel, in LA? You liked your flat there last I remembered.”

“I’m subletting it.”

“Wouldn’t it be safer to keep it empty?”

“Probably.” Arthur shifts a little. “But I— I don’t know, I like the idea of someone living in it.”

“And if that someone can’t be you…”

“Exactly.”

“There’s something to be had in that,” says Eames. “Did you know, I’ve never seen you overlook security on a whim like that. Not unless we’re counting the work itself.”

“It just seemed like a normal thing to do. Kind of— well, none of my income comes from above board business anymore, so there was— yeah, there was something in it.”

Something distant and compartmentalized, something that involved him in a transaction that had nothing to do with the international criminal underworld or the greedy underbelly of the corporate landscape. A taste of that something; no bigger meaning in Arthur’s purview.

"But you're not a domestic man, are you," says Eames. "Present situation notwithstanding. I didn't know you could cook.”

"Yeah. No, I'm not. The army happened for a reason."

"You've never told me why you enlisted," Eames says thoughtfully. "I never had the impression that you particularly enjoyed being in service."

"No, not really," Arthur sighs, rubbing a finger against the edge of the table.

"Would you rather not have?"

"No— well. I don't know." He grimaces. "I mean, I’d be a different person if I hadn't, and I'm not sure I'd like to be that person, you know? Be in a different— you ever think about where you'd be if you'd never dreamed?"

"Probably still a thief," says Eames. "Wouldn't be much different, would I? 'Cept I wouldn't know my way round explosives, I'd expect."

"Somehow I think you would."

"I'd expect you'd be in a library," says Eames.

"Is that what you think?" Arthur asks.

"Unless you were an adrenaline junkie even before the dreaming," Eames says.

Was he? Arthur tries to remember but finds the clarity of hindsight tainted by subjectivity. He could interpret a childhood feat of bicycle daredeviling a dozen different ways. Because— because the truth is, he'd hated the Project, and the military by extension, for the agency it had stripped from him, but he'd fallen in love with the man it had made him. Had the realization of that love been the death of some final soft-hearted adolescent part of him, he wonders. He is, technically, a veteran.

"I don't know," says Arthur. "Can't imagine myself doing anything else, though. I've liked this business for different reasons over the years."

"What's your reason now?"

"It hasn't killed me yet."

“That’s bloody depressing."

“You think it’s funny, admit it.” Because how many clients and marks and forges has Eames made fun of for having the same lack of purpose? The hilarity of fatalistic, self-aggrandized suffering.

And Eames laughs at that, watching Arthur’s face the whole time, like Arthur’s supposed to be telling him when to jump and how high. _Asshole,_  he thinks. _For making me think that I could make you care that much._

H’s barely finished loading the dishwasher when Eames jumps him. They stumble to his bedroom, making out messily, the numb taste of herb seasoning and beer still on Eames’ tongue. It isn’t long before Arthur finds himself naked and sprawled out under Eames, gasping, losing the ability to form coherent sentences.

 

 

He wakes up as the sun is just beginning to filter in through the curtains. Beside him, Eames is still sleeping. Arthur’s seen him asleep a thousand times before in the years they’ve known each other, but hardly ever in a non-professional capacity. He wonders how many people have seen Eames like this, like Arthur is seeing him now. When Eames was younger there might have been plenty, perhaps— when vulnerability, characteristic of that age, could be forgiven as openness.

It’s such a fleeting version of what Arthur wants that he feels a hot flash of anger. It’s gone in a second, but it had been there, full-force, self-directed.

His phone vibrates. Focused on Eames, it takes him a moment to register the buzzing as anything other than background noise; when he finally checks his notifications, he doesn’t find a text but alert after alert from various news sources: online publications, business newspapers, blogs.

He clicks on an article and begins to read.

_FRIDAY,  DECEMBER 17: Robert Fischer, current CEO of energy industry giant Fischer-Morrow Enterprises, announced his plans to dissolve the conglomerate in a press conference yesterday afternoon._

_“In light of my father’s recent passing, I think that it is in both my best interests and the best interests of Fischer-Morrow to pursue a new business venture,” said Fischer, 32. “Maurice Fischer definitely had high aspirations for this company when he and my mother were first starting out, and that’s what got us this far. That being said, he made it clear that he always wanted me to enact my own vision for Fischer-Morrow. I’m very grateful today to have that opportunity.”_

_Maurice Fischer, who died at the age of 71 earlier this month, co-founded Fischer-Morrow Enterprises with his then business partner and future wife Theresa Morrow. Following Morrow’s death in 1989 after a lengthy battle with pancreatic cancer, Maurice Fischer’s close friend and chief business advisor Peter Browning…_

Arthur skims the rest of the article, then clicks on the next, and the next. With buzzing fingertips, he reaches for the remote and turns the TV on.

Beside him, Eames stirs sleepily. He groans and mumbles something incoherent before managing, “It’s too early for this, darling.”

“Shh,” Arthur says, then, “no, wait, Eames, get up. You need to see this.” He grabs Eames’ shoulder and shakes it a couple times.

“Darling,” says Eames, rolling over so his face is in view, “whatever it is, I—”

His brow furrows and his mouth falls open as he registers what’s on the TV.

BREAKING: HEIR TO FISCHER-MORROW ENTERPRISES DISSOLVES CONGLOMERATE

“Yeah, asshole,” Arthur says.

They watch the news program together, the sheets pooled around Arthur’s hips and Eames’ chest, and when Arthur looks at Eames out of the corner of his eyes, he knows that they’re both thinking the same thing:

_We did that. Us.The whole fucking world is reeling in shock and no one will ever know._

“Well,” says Eames after a while of them sitting in silence and staring at the TV, “this puts me in quite the celebratory mood.”

He wraps his fingers around Arthur’s wrist, and Arthur lets himself be dragged back down to the bed. They fuck and feel like gods.

 

* * *

 

 

Afterwards Arthur goes out and buys the day’s WSJ. He reads the Fischer article on a bench next to the newsstand before making his way back to his place. In the elevator he wonders if he should call Ariadne, then decides that he should probably wait and let her contact him. It’s her first job, after all, and she’ll probably be bursting to reach out to someone on the team.

Dom is the first one to call Arthur, it turns out. Arthur’s just about to heat up Eames’ takeout from yesterday when the phone rings.

“Hey Cobb,” says Arthur. “You heard the news, huh?”

“Saito called me,” Dom says mildly. “He says to tell everyone congratulations.”

Eames comes out of the bathroom just then, hair wet and a towel around his waist. Arthur flashes a quick smile, perfunctory.

“Yeah, well, thanks. How does it feel to have done it on purpose this time?” Arthur asks dryly.

“Gratifying,” replies Dom, apparently not at all surprised that Arthur’s figured it out. On cue, there’s a shriek in the background— James, maybe? Arthur hasn’t seen the kids in a while.

“Hard to believe that it took,” Arthur says. “I secretly didn’t think it’d transfer over into the waking world.”

Across the room, where he’s getting dressed, Eames says, “You’ve got no bloody faith, darling.”

 _Fuck off_ , Arthur mouths at him.

“—wasn’t worried about that until after we finished the job. With Mal, you know, it happened when I didn’t want it to,” Dom is saying. Then: “Hold on, is that Eames?”

“Uh. Yeah,” says Arthur, flicking a glance at a boxer-clad Eames.

“Wow.” Arthur can’t figure out if Dom sounds shocked or impressed.

“Is he asking about me?” says Eames. “Tell him I’m fine and lovely and gorgeous, and that I still want to bloody kill him for keeping life-threatening secrets from the rest of us, will you, darling.”

“You know what?" Arthur says into the phone. “I think I’m going to have to call you back.”

He hangs up and says immediately, “Eames, you piece of _shit_ ,” and Eames is laughing, loud and bright.

 

* * *

 

Really, he doesn’t know how this happened, how he and Eames could have sex and laugh with each other afterwards. He wonders what he isn’t seeing, what slipped under his radar while he was sleeping, what has managed to shift in the space between kisses.

 

* * *

 

Ariadne does call him, eventually. At the end of the day, Eames is still in his apartment, poking through drawers and making dumb comments about the clothes in Arthur’s closet when he isn’t sprawled on the couch reading Arthur’s copy of  _Catch-22_ or eating his food. It’s absolutely terrifying. Arthur never wants it to end.

“Darling, Ozwald Boateng, really?” Eames shouts from the bedroom. “I’m not saying that you couldn’t pull it off, but well, honestly—”

“Eames, be quiet, I’m taking a call,” Arthur shouts back. He picks up the phone and says, “This is Arthur speaking.”

“Do you always answer the phone like that even when you know who it is?” Ariadne’s voice is small and tinny through the receiver, but it still has its usual earnest, feathery quality. Arthur smiles involuntarily.

“This is my work phone. You want me to pick up and say ‘Hey, what’s up,’ you track down my personal number,” he replies, looking up as Eames walks into the kitchen. “Which no one’s ever been able to do.”

She laughs, and Arthur imagines her sitting back in her chair at her dorm room desk, hand resting lightly on the arm, looking down at a rolled-out blueprint. Or maybe she’s at home on winter break, holed up in her tiny childhood bedroom, avoiding overbearing aunts and screechy cousins.

“I saw the news,” she says. “It worked.”

“Hell of a first job, inception,” says Arthur. “Hey, we couldn’t have done it without you.”

“I know.” A sigh. Arthur thinks she’s the least ceremonious wunderkind he’s ever met. She’d attacked the Fischer job like she’d had something to prove— to whom, Arthur hadn’t been sure, but she’d been tremendously unarrogant about it, the best kind of team member to work with.

“You don’t sound happy about it,” he says.

“I know,” she says again. “I’m glad it paid off, but…” There’s a faint rustle on the other end. “Can I ask you a personal question?”

“Go ahead,” Arthur says slowly.

“Did you ever feel guilty about it? Not Fischer, I mean. Well, maybe Fischer. But like, when you first got started with dreamshare and you started messing around inside people’s heads. Was there ever, I don’t know, a feeling that you weren’t supposed to be…”

“I know what you mean,” Arthur says. “It was different for me, though. I started dreamsharing as a Green Beret. They kept the Project more secret than a lot of black ops missions I’d been a part of, because of the ethical factor of testing on soldiers and the whole thing about government-monitored dreams, you know. It wasn’t me doing it to other people, it was the project supervisors and scientists doing it to all of us. And hell, I thought don’t-ask-don’t-tell gave me a right to privacy.” He inhales, exhales on a sigh. “So no, not really.”

“Then what about after you got out? When you first started extracting?”

After a moment of consideration, Arthur says, “I don’t think so. But then again, it’s different from inception. Once you get past the whole fucking mindcrime part, extraction’s just another form of espionage. It’s like being a PI. You dig up someone’s dirt, you sell that service. Even journalists do that, to an extent.”

“So inception’s different.”

“It’s a hell of a first job, like I said.”

“It’s— I didn’t think it would have so much _magnitude_.”

“Simple idea, huh.” He scratches his chin.

“And now Fischer’s changed forever. The world’s changed forever.”

“If it makes you feel better, we helped move the energy industry away from a global monopoly. And gave Fischer a free therapy session. I heard he might be going into clean energy now.”

“So if you weigh the pros and cons,” Ariadne says, then stops. “But we’ll never know what would have happened to Fischer if we hadn't incepted him.”

Eames pulls out a cigarette and fits it between his lips.

 _Outside,_ Arthur mouths at him.

Eames makes a face and puts the cigarette back into its pack.

“It might become a hard thing to live with someday,” Arthur says to Ariadne calmly. “Have you talked to Cobb yet? I’m sure he knows plenty about post-inception guilt.”

“I haven't,” she says. “I didn’t want to talk to him before I touched base with you first.”

“You should.”

“Sure. We’ll talk about our feelings and commiserate. It'll be like a sleepover.”

Arthur laughs. “Go do that.”

“Yup. Bye, Arthur.”

“Bye.” He ends the call and turns around to find Eames watching him. “What?”

“You like her.” It's nothing more than a statement of fact, mildly curious.

“Yeah. She's smart, refreshing. God, she's so young. The industry's not gonna let go of her, if she keeps coming back.”

Eames chuckles. “Which she will. She's enamored with it. Don't let her get hands on a PASIV of her own.”

“Eames.”

“Hmm?”

“Do you feel guilty about it? Ever?”

Eames tilts his head back, gazing at Arthur through half-lidded eyes. “No,” he says, and Arthur believes him. “Do you?”

He thinks of their conversation at dinner last night and is surprised at how easily, truthfully he replies, “No.”

 

* * *

 

Monday comes, and Eames goes back to sleeping in his own bed. Arthur turns up the thermostat in his apartment.

They go to work. Twenty minutes on the clock: Kezia takes them under and shows them her finalized build. Arthur memorizes all the colors and shapes of the rooms. Eames tests out the comfortability of all the office chairs.

“Time’s about to run out,” Arthur says, checking his watch. “Good work. Thanks, Kezia.”

“No problem,” she replies. “I’ll leave my blueprints and models with you, right?”

“Yeah. We’ll call you if we need anything. I’ll wire you the money when the job’s done. Shouldn’t be more than a week.”

She’s packed up and gone by ten o’ clock.

Arthur says, “Eames, we’re going to the spa.”

“We wouldn’t happen to be mixing business and pleasure, would we?” asks Eames.

“We do that plenty already,” says Arthur. “No, I need you to distract the receptionist while I find out when O’Connell’s booked his next massage. Ask for a fucking tour or something, I don’t know.”

“You think it’s this week, then?” asks Eames.

“In the next few days, probably. He does this at the end of every month, but the place is closed from Christmas Eve through the second. He’s gotta get it in before, if not, then we find something that’s happening after New Year’s.”

“If all goes well, we’ll be out of here before the ball drops.”

“Yeah,” says Arthur. “Let’s go.”

By the afternoon, there’s a completely flirted-with receptionist, a confirmed appointment time, and a well-bribed masseuse.

 

In the evening, Arthur gets an email.

_Hi Arthur-- I’m still getting job offers but I’m not planning on taking any in the foreseeable future. Thought this one might interest you, so I decided I’d pass it along. Let me know if it does and I’ll refer the client to you._

_It’s a good job for you and Eames. How’s that going, by the way?_

_Dom_

“Eames,” says Arthur. He clicks open the file attachment, reads through a few lines.

If all goes well, they’ll wrap Fraser’s job by Thursday night. By Friday morning, Arthur will have distributed the cut and he and Eames will have parted ways. He imagines himself holed up in his apartment with a pizza, reading some tacky paperback with a shitty romantic subplot on Christmas, drinking too much tequila at some shitty bar on New Year’s.

“Yeah,” Eames calls back.

He thinks of the Zolkin job in St. Petersburg, how Eames had bought a ridiculously furred ushanka hat and worn it to work every day. They’d gone their separate ways after, Arthur with Cobb, Eames off to a warmer climate, only to meet again in Paris eight months later.

And at LAX, Arthur walking away again.

He says, “There’s gonna be a job in Chicago. I need an extractor.”

 

 

Arthur makes the silent decision to stay at Eames’ place for the night, and Eames silently lets him. Encourages it, maybe, if the Ethiopian takeout he brings back is anything to go by.

“Standard mix?” asks Arthur, near midnight. Neither of them have made any effort to head to bed, for sleep or otherwise. He disguises his consternation at the fact that he’s getting a head start on a job as an excuse to hang around Eames by keeping himself firmly chained to his laptop, digging up everything he can find on their prospective mark. “We’ll still have some left after this job’s done.”

“Mm.”

“Architect? Shouldn’t have to be very complicated. Mark doesn’t have any recorded history of mental illness, doesn’t seem to be militarized either.”

“Arthur,” says Eames thoughtfully.

“Yeah?”

“Couldn’t you do it?”

He swallows and works his jaw, once, before saying, “I— yeah. I mean, maybe. Technically.”

“I’ve seen you build,” Eames says.

“Only for demonstrative purposes.”

“It was— it’s good, it’s accurate. We don’t need an Ariadne for this job— we can’t. It’d be overdoing it. Your architecture’s perfectly appropriate for our purposes.”

“It’s just,” says Arthur, “it’s just that I haven’t actually built in a long time.”

“I thought the reason you didn’t build with Cobb was because he knew your mazes too well,” says Eames, and trust him to know that even if Arthur’s never told him about it. “But we don’t have to worry about that anymore, do we?”

“I don’t know, Eames.” Arthur looks at the clock on the wall, at the edge of the table, at his hands, thin-fingered and younger-looking than he feels like they should be. “I don’t know if I can.”

“If you’d really rather not, then we could hire another architect. Kezia again, maybe.” Eames’ tone is careful, and Arthur hates it.

“No,” says Arthur. “Listen— I’ll think about it, okay? Let me consider it, and I’ll let you know.”

“Well,” says Eames. “You’re the one in charge of the team members.”

 

* * *

 

This is something that Samuel O’Connell, CFO of Fortune 500 company AmbivaCorp, will never know:

On the twenty-third of December in the year 2010, halfway through his monthly full-body massage, his masseuse lets two of the most accomplished men in dreamshare into the room and steps out. One of them sticks him in the ass with a tranquilizer. The other— yes, hello, that’s Arthur— sets up the PASIV and plugs him in.

“Ten minutes should do nicely,” Eames says once the cannula is in his wrist. “Fruitful dreaming, darling.”

Arthur lets the left corner of his mouth, the side of his face that isn’t facing Eames, curl up into a smile just before he depresses the plunger.

 

 

He blinks up at the glass and steel office building in front of him, shielding his eyes from the morning sunlight rippling off the tinted windows.

“Look, there’s Riley,” says Eames, pointing to a blonde woman in a pencil skirt entering the building. Together, they follow her inside.

As soon as he passes through the metal detector in the lobby, Arthur dreams a gun into his suit jacket.

Eames brushes past him toward the elevators, clipping an ID badge to Arthur’s belt as he does so. ARTHUR DARLING, SECURITY, it reads.

“I could have done that myself,” he murmurs to Eames, scanning the badge against the elevator panel.

“But it wouldn’t have been as convincing, would it?” Eames replies. “As much as you’ve got an attention for detail, Arthur Darling, I know there’s more than one type of forgery you can’t manage.”

Arthur scowls as the elevator doors open. They step inside. Eames presses the sixteenth floor; Arthur presses the second.

“I’ll give you fifteen minutes once I see you up there,” he says, pulling an earwig out of his pocket and clipping it on.

The elevator dings. Eames says, “See you topside, darling.”

Arthur nods, adjusts the lapels of his unimaginative black suit, and steps out onto the second floor. The door rolls shut behind him. He attaches a silencer to his Glock before heading swiftly down the hallway towards the security office. Scanning his badge against the door frame, he bursts in.

A bullet in the head of the security guard projection monitoring the camera footage display. The man slumps forward onto the keyboard. Arthur lets the bullet casing clatter to the floor.

The office isn’t much bigger than a custodial closet. Arthur drags the projection off its chair and onto the floor, settling himself down at the desk.

And there’s Eames— walking towards O’Connell’s office on the sixteenth floor. Sarah Riley waves him in from her secretarial office disinterestedly and he disappears from view. There isn’t a camera in O’Connell’s office, but Arthur can imagine the conversation they must be having: _Hello, Mr. O’Connell. How’s the family? How’s business? You’re looking quite wealthy. I’m sorry that AmbivaCorp’s stock has been dropping recently._

There won’t be anything about embezzlement, of course, but Eames will skirt the topic beautifully. By the time Arthur makes his way up there, there isn’t much to do except ask.

Sarah Riley says, “He keeps a flash drive on his person. There’s a program on it— it funnels money into a private account, discreetly.” Her face is blank, emotionless. For all that O’Connell trusts her, Arthur thinks.

“Is anything on the flash drive password protected?”

“Yes.” She reaches for a stack of Post-its, scribbles out a series of randomized letters and numbers.

“Thank you,” he says, memorizing it quickly, and shoots her in the head.

He sits in front of her desk until Edith sings her last.

 

 

“He’ll be awake within seven minutes or so,” Arthur tells the masseuse, handing her an extra hundred just in case.

They check the coatroom on their way out of the spa: a flash drive in an expensive wool peacoat, theirs for the taking.

 

* * *

 

“You and Cobb,” Eames begins, once everything’s been hand-delivered to Fraser and they’re each a few drinks in.

“We weren’t fucking, or whatever you think was going on between us.”

Eames shakes his head, unsmiling; remarkably straightforward for him. “What were the terms of your partnership?”

Arthur shrugs. “Get him back home, to his kids. Try not to get ourselves killed in the process.”

Eames raises his eyebrows. “That’s all.”

“Did we need anything more than that? Look, it wasn’t— I wasn’t looking to profit, or anything. It wasn’t a _business_ partnership, Eames— we had one goal. Didn’t need to print out a contract for that.”

“You couldn’t really stop him from doing anything once he decided to set his mind to being a massive bloody idiot, could you?” Eames sets down his glass, lets out a small sigh.

“Why do you think there was the Cobol job? Why inception?” Because they’re sitting together, and so close, Arthur lets himself look at Eames, really drink everything in. Eames won’t fault him for it— there’s nothing else to look at anyway.

He’s paler than usual, stubble almost long enough to constitute a full beard. His clothes are thicker than the ones he usually prefers, the colors more muted, and that’s how Arthur knows that the dry winter’s been getting to him— that and the fact that his lips are a little chapped. There’s this look on his face, one that Arthur’s never seen on _his_ face, exactly, but he’s seen it on Eames’ forges when he’s working a mark and slowly edging his way around to the real question he wants to ask. Arthur’s kind of afraid of what that question might be, here.

“So if you _were_ offered an actual, you know, proper business partnership,” says Eames, “would you draw up a contract?”

“No,” says Arthur, knowing full well what he’s walking into now. “What would that do? It’s not like I could sue if it was violated. And look— when we extract shit, we never have any concrete proof that the info we give to our clients is legit— that’s why Saito tagged along, right? He wanted to see it happen, know that it happened. But that rarely happens on a job. This is dreamshare. Your reputation’s built on how reliable your word is.”

“So state your terms,” Eames says softly.

 

* * *

 

And so ushers in a new era in Arthur’s dreamshare career, though should have expected it: he works best when there’s a system, a routine established, and someone he trusts to navigate it. And he’s hardly surprised that that someone this time around is Eames.

 _If my first extractor had to be Dom, it’s fitting that my second one would be Eames,_ he thinks, then, _the fuck is that supposed to mean?_

There’s celebratory sex, obviously, which makes Arthur feel like they’re consummating the goddamn partnership or something. Every one of Eames’ kisses has a note of triumph, fervent and slightly possessive. It’s a wild, headboard-creaking affair, and when they finally collapse next to each other, sweaty, sated, Arthur doesn’t think he’ll be able to get out of bed for the next week.

After Eames has dropped off to sleep, he remembers the feeling he had, stepping off the plane at LAX and walking out into the gate. He’d reached a crossroads, right there in the airport terminal.

He looks at Eames, who’s begun to snore slightly, just a soft grumble in the back of his throat when he inhales. He remembers this, too: that he thought he’d only ever get to see this once in his entire life.

And maybe that’s his problem. Arthur, the ultimate point man, who’s built a career out of never overestimating the chances. Maybe he’s too fucking afraid of believing in a chance at a good life.

_Fucking dream a little bigger, you coward._

Maybe he can do anything he wants. Like form a business partnership with Eames. Like have sex with Eames. Like laugh with him afterwards. Like build a dream and design the maze himself. They’ve got a forger who can extract, why not a point man who can build?

Eventually he falls asleep, too, and wakes up in the morning to the sound of the shower shutting off.

When the bathroom door opens, Arthur says to the ceiling, “I’ll be your architect. We can fly out tomorrow; there’s a flight in the afternoon.”

He can hear Eames pause on his way across the room. “Darling—”

He sits up. “No, listen. I’m saying I’ll do it. It’s been a while, but— I want to. That’s all.”

Eames is watching him carefully. He says, “I’m glad.”

 

* * *

 

The airport is sparsely populated, but even so there’s a frenzied sort of exhaustion to it, families traveling to snowier places camped out in gates and half-functioning cafes.

“Well, they’re certainly having a sorry Christmas, aren’t they?” Eames says cheerfully as they head towards their own gate.

Arthur snorts. “And what are we having?”

“We’ve just collected a high five-figures payout and we’re getting on a lovely first-class flight to collect another one,” says Eames. “Obviously. But I could steal a Fabergé egg for you come March, if you want. Happy Christmas, darling.”

Arthur smiles dryly. “Merry Christmas to you too.”

On the flight, he drinks a cup of cheap champagne and watches Eames sleep across the aisle. This is the third Christmas he’s spent traveling. It might be becoming something of a habit. He might even be liking it, this time around.

 

* * *

 

Winter in Chicago is a special kind of hell. Arthur, who’d barely adjusted to New York in the three weeks he’d spent there, briefly fantasizes about planning out of the Caribbean and then flying back up north for the extraction itself.

“We’re taking a job in the southern hemisphere after this,” he mutters to Eames as their taxi pulls up to the hotel. “I’d rather work in Jo’burg and wait for Cobol to track me down than freeze in safety.”

Eames chuckles. “You poor thing,” he says, breath white in the air like weak cigarette smoke. “You’d leave your Glock behind and take an offer in Australia, wouldn’t you?”

“Maybe not that,” Arthur admits, only half-joking. “But hey, if you can’t shoot at them, that means they can’t shoot at you either.”

“Hm. São Paulo?”

“Better. My Portuguese isn’t great, though.”

“Santiago.”

“That one’s good.”

“If your Spanish is fluent, then how come you wouldn’t work in a Portuguese-speaking country?”

“Never said I _wouldn’t_ ,” says Arthur. “But it’s better, working in an area where you can communicate easily. And I’m talking relative levels of ‘not great’— I can understand most Portuguese, just can’t speak it. Hi,” he says to the receptionist. “Two rooms, one under King and one under Charles.”

“Hilarious, darling,” Eames murmurs. Arthur lightly scuffs the tip of his shoe against Eames’ shin.

In the elevator, Arthur says, “We’ve got a meeting with the client tomorrow at lunch. Wear something professional.”

“Don’t I always?” Eames looks at Arthur, one eyebrow cocked, eyes wide.

“Jesus Christ,” say Arthur.

They reach their floor and step out into the hallway.

“Adjacent rooms,” says Eames. “Lovely.”

“Connected rooms,” Arthur says, and looks at Eames carefully.

“Leave your side unlocked, then.”

Arthur rolls his eyes before he goes inside, but unlocks the door between their rooms anyway. Not a minute later, Eames pokes his head in.

“Hello,” he says. “It’s nearly six. Room service?”

“Sure,” Arthur replies, hanging up his winter coat. “Use my phone if you want. Get me a burger and a Greek salad or something.”

As Eames is ordering, Arthur sits at the foot of his queen-sized bed and wonders how many nights he won’t be the only one sleeping in it.

 

 

Dinner: tucked into the breakfast nook, shoeless, greasy fingers. Eames has a couple crumbs stuck on his chin and Arthur finds himself too fond to say anything.

“If you hate the cold so much,” says Eames, “why do you live in New York?”

Arthur shrugs, wipes his mouth. “It’s a good city.”

“You should have someplace warm to go to in the winter. A Mombasa, if you will.”

“Don’t you already know all the cities I’ve got places in?”

“Darling, we’re trying to be civilized here,” says Eames.

 

 

Sometime in the middle of the night, drifting: the lamp on Eames’ side of the bed is on.

Arthur grumbles incoherently.

“It’s all right, darling, go back to sleep,” says Eames.

Arthur shifts, turns away from Eames. He falls asleep to the sound of pen scratching against paper.

Come morning Eames is back in his own room, but the door is open. Arthur sits up and gets dressed.

There are two handwritten business cards on the nightstand:

KING ARTHUR  
_point man and architect extraordinaire_

CHARLES EAMES  
_the bloke who makes the bloody chairs_

“Idiot,” Arthur calls, his voice deep and rough. “You gonna leave these here for the hotel staff to find?”

“What are you going to do about it?” Eames shouts back.

Arthur smiles, tucks the first card into his wallet. The second one— well, what’s the harm?

 

* * *

 

Their client says, over a plate of coq au vin, “I really don’t care how you get me this information. To be honest, I’m still not convinced that this whole dream… extraction… _thing_ isn’t a scam.”

“So, Mr. Szafranski,” Arthur says smoothly, “we could hypothetically find a way to get you the information topside. But there’s a much higher risk factor involved in that, plus a lower success rate. I really don’t think that’s what you’re paying us eighty grand to do, is it?”

“If you really are unconvinced, we could give you a demonstration, of course,” adds Eames. “Your office, one of our hotel rooms, doesn’t matter.”

“I couldn’t care less,” says Szafranski. “Just get me the info.”

Arthur arches an eyebrow. “We just want to make sure you know you’re making a sound investment.”

 

 

They take him under. Arthur raises blocks of concrete and steel on an exhale, a bastardized memory of the compound that had housed Project Somnacin, breathes the haze of dread and fear that went with it into the air.

Szafranski, next to him, shivers.

“Arthur, love,” says Eames on his other side, “this is visceral, really, wonderful job, but— could we have an atmosphere less likely to breed distrust?”

Arthur shrugs, warms the fluorescent lights and unsharpens the corners of the room.

“That’s better. Mr. Szafranski? Let’s sit down and continue our conversation.”

Szafranski frowns, looking around. “Wasn’t there just— where’d my food go?”

“Oh, we’ve moved on from that,” Eames says pleasantly. “How’s your mother? Is she doing any better?”

“We’re trying to move her into a retirement facility,” Szafranski says, rubbing his forehead. “She won’t listen.”

“Right. Well, I’m off. Arthur, keep him talking, will you?” Eames stands up, buttons his jacket, and bounds down the hallway.

Arthur takes a seat and says, “I don’t think you can blame her, man. I mean, how would you feel if you got old and your kids dumped you into someone else’s hands?”

Szafranski frowns. “I don’t have kids.”

“Neither do I. But I’m saying I can sympathize. I know how important it is to put up a fight.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever been here before,” says Szafranski.

“Haven’t you?” Arthur asks. “It’s the place we go to talk about your mother. Her name’s Anna, right?”

“Yeah, Anna.”

Topside, five minutes later in real time, Eames is sketching, moving the pencil rapidly, putting down lines with efficient strokes of his wrist. “Your mother’s name is Anna Helena Szafranski, maiden name Kozlowski. She emigrated to the US at the age of nine, liked baking but not cooking when you were growing up, and she looks… like… this.” He turns the sketchbook around, shows it to Szafranski.

Szafranski swallows, eyes widening at the sketch. “All right.”

“You never even realized you were dreaming, did you?”

“He knew something was off,” says Arthur. “But no, he didn’t.”

“Why didn’t I?” demands Szafranski.

Eames spreads his hands, smiles. “It takes years of training,” he says. “Or a dire reason to learn quickly.”

“We’ll get your job done, Mr. Szafranski,” Arthur says.

And they do. It takes Arthur three days to dig up the right information on their mark, another week to get the dreamscape the way he wants it, nine days for Eames to scout out a potential forge. The method of extraction comes together literally overnight.

(Jesus Christ, the pillowtalk gets so fucking bizarre when you’re fucking your business partner.)

They give Szafranski the information the morning after the heist.

“Say hello to your mother for me,” Eames tosses out over his shoulder on their way out of Szafranski’s glass-paneled office, grinning sunnily.

 

* * *

 

They go easy for a while, one two-person job after another, like they’re testing the waters of this new arrangement where they fuck at night and then get dressed in the morning and talk business. It’s the kind of thing that would be pointless and too easy to compartmentalize, of course, so Eames flirts like always, and when he says something stupidly brilliant, Arthur draws the tip of his shoe up Eames’ shin ever so slowly until he shivers. And things are easy.

Easy: they get an email from a tech company’s head of security requesting the militarization of four executives. They spend three days on each person and come out fifty thousand dollars richer apiece.

Easy: a cereal producer wants confirmation of overt collusion between two of its rivals before its private investigators go in and find enough evidence for a lawsuit. Two weeks of planning. Two weeks after that, they extract from one of the rival companies’ most susceptible board members before his root canal.

Easy: a Mexican multimillionaire banking magnate wants to know if his wife is cheating on him. They don’t even need a PASIV for this one. Arthur traces the origin of a Swarovski necklace, a Michael Kors gown, and three pieces of Victoria’s Secret lingerie all addressed to the wife’s name. Eames wants to tell their client that they’ve found absolutely no evidence of cheating, but acquiesces when Arthur deems that ridiculously unbelievable and decides that they’ll just give the wrong name and withhold the identity of the woman whom the wife is fucking when her husband’s away on business.

“You’ve got to admit that she’s good, though,” says Eames after they’ve passed on the false information to the client. He’s drinking a garishly colored cocktail with a pink umbrella in it.

“Who? The wife or the other woman?”

“The other woman. Look at these gifts. They’re something a _man_ would give to a woman who marries rich. I reckon she actually does know the definition of a proper romantic gesture, just likes to taunt him. He’ll never guess.”

Arthur thinks, frankly, that it’s petty and dangerous to be rubbing it in their client’s face like that because there isn’t really any way this could work out remotely in the wife’s favor in a divorce, but reminds himself that he’s a career criminal getting paid to invade subconsciouses, and truly, he’s seen much worse things than that.

 

 

Easy: falling into bed with Eames. First to liven things up in the middle of a job, then to commemorate yet another successful extraction, then it just happens whenever one of them is in the mood.

He thinks of how easy it would be, also, for this to crash and burn.

 

* * *

 

"I don't care if you're a creative fucking genius, this isn't a two person job," Arthur tells Eames.

They still bickered, a habit; it came with the territory. Mostly it was good-natured. But borne out of an efficient partnership was a pretty decent level of intuition for each other's thought processes, and sometimes agreement wasn’t so much verbal confirmation as it was a shared look or one of them just following along with the other.

Just like that: they’d nodded to each other across yet another dim-lit diner booth and taken the plunge. In that same night, Arthur had combed through his inbox for a job that meant adrenaline and woken Eames sleeping in the other room when he’d found one.

Manhattan again, getting warmer now.

“Darling,” Eames sighs, like he’s the long-suffering one, “it’s not the actual extraction we need a third person for, it’s your workload, and as I’ve said, two and a half bloody months, you can afford to take your bloody time—”

“You know that’s not all of it. A job like this needs more than time— topside’s not the issue here.”

“Forget the Fischer job, Christ, Arthur, if that’s why you think we need to expand our operations just because we’ve taken on something slightly more challenging now—”

“Three’s a clean job. Two’s a risk.” Arthur glares at Eames. “I’m calling someone in and that’s final. An architect at the very least. Someone who has the control for in-dream manipulation.”

“Mm, that someone sounds like you.”

“Eames.”

“What, you think I haven’t seen your little paradoxical stunts a million times by now? You, my friend, are something else in a dreamscape, and that something else is called versatile. Which is not a word I bandy about lightly, mind you— that right there is my entire lifeblood. You should feel highly fucking honored.”

“Why is it that every time you compliment me I end up feeling like I’ve just been verbally assaulted,” says Arthur. “Anyway, I’m still calling someone in. How do you feel about Ariadne?”

“Can’t say no to a mind like hers,” Eames concedes, pressing his fingers to his lips and looking out the window and generally exuding the aura of some sort of meditative hipster, which, okay, if he weren’t Eames, he probably would be one.

 

 

“Arthur, I’ve got _midterms,_ ” is what Ariadne says when he tells her.

Arthur sighs.

“I mean, I can consult long distance if you really need me?” she says apologetically. “Anyway, it doesn’t… sound like a lot. Email me your stuff and I’ll talk it out with you, but honestly, I think you’ve got it.”

“Okay.” He sighs again.

“Come on, it’s not that bad. Hey, if you pay me extra, I’ll pick up more of the slack.”

“No, no,” he says, resigning himself to doing double-duty. “I just hate proving Eames right.”

The next morning, Arthur walks into his kitchen, dressed to head out, and finds Eames sitting at his table with a cup of coffee and scrolling through his phone.

“Look, I’m fine with you breaking into my place, but just text me beforehand,” Arthur says.

“You off somewhere?” Eames asks, not looking up.

He shrugs. “MoMA.”

“Just bloody look online if you need references, Jesus, you hipster. You look like a coffee shop writer.”

He laughs, grabs a banana and a granola bar, and steps out of the door.

Inside the museum, he sits on a bench with his moleskine and sketches these little scratchy drawings like he’s seen Eames do, who somehow doesn’t make them look hurried— just full of movement. He thinks, if he were looking at himself in these skinny jeans and this cable-knit sweater, he’d be seeing a local art student stumped for inspiration. Or any kid, honestly, new to the city and trying to find more culture within themselves.

Arthur never could have been someone like that. It would be the kind of life that would look good on him, an architecturally acceptable loft apartment, a straightlaced boyfriend whose idea of rebellion was PDA and a Che Guevara t-shirt. But Christ— _Jesus Christ, how do you survive like that?_

He sits there for a little while more. He picks out and discards two women and a man who look like they might own El Che t-shirts. He sketches a diagram, clean and simple, of how to hide a missing-square puzzle in a Mondrian painting.

Finally, tired of the atmosphere, he goes home.

Eames is reclined in Arthur’s chipped bathtub, knees rising out of the soapy water like newly-formed mountains. He’s got his left hand hanging over the side holding a glass of wine.

“What _are_ you,” Arthur says, because there’s really nothing else to say to this.

“No, in fact,” Eames says brightly, his eyes mostly closed, “The question is, what is Theodore Oscar?”

Arthur blinks.

Eames says, “Go on.”

“Our mark.”

“Yes, but what else?”

“Fuck you, stop that. Why are you taking a bath? It’s noon.”

“Man’s hedonistic indulgences obey not the normal conventions of day,” says Eames, which is approximately Reason Number 985 that Arthur gets these simultaneous urges to both take off all his clothes for Eames and call the cops on him.

After a moment of silence, Eames says, “He is, like us, a thief. An art thief, which is absolutely different from what we do, but he’s well-versed in what he does.”

“I know, I did the research on him.”

“I wasn’t finished.” Eames opens his eyes, finally, and says, “He is a thief, and you don’t thieve a thief.”

“...And you’ve double-crossed like, how many people in dreamshare by now?”

“Not important.” Eames takes a gulp of wine. “What I really mean is, right, if he’s good enough to steal a Piet Mondrian from under the Gutenberg family’s noses, then our typical brute force lead-and-extract bit is going to immediately put him on edge. He’ll protect that bit of information enough to put it somewhere special, yes, but it’ll also make him paranoid as all hell. Plus the whole… he’s-dreamt-before thing. Hm. Have you ever been non-consensually extracted from?”

Arthur scowls. “Not successfully.”

“So what happened?”

“They broke into my hostel room, dragged me under, tied me to a chair, tried to interrogate me… I beat them up with said chair, shot myself in the head, tied _them_ all up, interrogated them, then shot them all in the head.”

“Precisely, you maniac. You fought back. So what we’ve got to do is use that against him. Make him feel like he’s gotten the kick, only he hasn’t, so we get to keep working when he’s at his most paranoid and thus most susceptible.”

“So two levels?” asks Arthur, thinking back to the Saito job.

“That’s a bit messy for a two-person job, yeah?”

“Exactly, I fucking told you—”

“No, no, this actually makes it easier, see— all we need to do is make one level seem like two. I’m going to make a call to Yusuf, he’s probably got the compound we need.”

 

 

The apartment is quiet at noon. Eames is cooking— or trying to— in the kitchen. Arthur’s sent off a couple emails to Ariadne already, and he’s sitting in front of the coffee table in the living room trying to figure out how to translate a tubular Mobius strip onto paper. For some reason his thoughts keep on going back to Eames’ knees in the bath. Not in a sexy way— seriously, how are knees supposed to be sexy in any way— but like. Well. Maybe Arthur’s subconscious is still at the MoMA, but those knobbly knees poking out of the water make him want to draw Eames. (Suddenly he feels tenderness like an explosionful of shrapnel to the chest.)

He keeps on going back to it: Eames’ head tipped back against the tile, an eye cracked open, watching Arthur. The tenderness in his chest won’t go. Not so long as he’s here with Eames, not so long as Eames is bared open to him like this, like a man who hasn’t killed to survive in their world.

 _After the job, I’ll tell him,_ he thinks, grinning as Eames hits his hand against the lit stovetop and flinches back, cursing.

 

* * *

 

The thing is that when Arthur weighs his potential losses, he knows he won’t just be losing a very good fuck; he’ll be losing one of the most gratifying and effective business relationships he’s ever had. And he’d hate himself for causing that kind of regression in his career more so than anything else that he’d hate about losing Eames— because they just work really fucking well with each other.

The impulse to tell Eames is so strong despite it all that Arthur feels drunk with it. And on nights when he’s alone in bed, he feels the lack of a familiar presence like it's more than just the absence of warmth. He feels it like something that’s fell away from his grasp, or like some part of his body that’s gone very far away from the rest of him.

 

* * *

 

Once they go under, it ends up going surprisingly smoothly. They’ve rehearsed the setup well enough that Theodore Oscar, drugged up with a cocktail of Somnacin and deliriants, plays right into their hands.

Arthur appears in a large, high-ceilinged atrium. One wall is comprised entirely of floor-to-ceiling windows, through which he can see a clear, gushing waterfall, and, farther downstream, a six-story building, which is a windowless, bastardized version of the Gutenberg Museum.

He fishes around in his pocket and digs out an earpiece, which he clips in. Already, Eames’ voice can be heard:

“—have your admission pass, sir?”

His undoubtedly flawless New York accent sounds completely unnatural to Arthur.

A pause.

“Awesome, thank you very much. Is this your first time scheduling a gallery tour with us?”

“Uh, no.” That’s Oscar’s voice, distant-sounding and slightly slurry. “I— I’ve been here before.”

“Fantastic, then you’ll know all about what the Gutenberg has to offer. Though we rotate exhibitions every two to three months, so other than our three main permanent galleries, I’m sure you’ll get to see a bunch of new pieces. Our most recent addition is the Evolution of Piet Mondrian exhibit, which we’ll get to see near the end of our tour. First off, though, do you have any particular interests in any specific artists or movements?”

“Not really. Hey, where’s the nearest bathroom?”

“Down that flight of stairs and to your right, sir.”

“Thanks. ‘Scuse me.”

Radio silence. Arthur makes his way into an office room along the side of the atrium, where a projection version of Eames is slumped in an armchair and hooked up to a PASIV. Then:

“Right, he’s caught on, he’s exited the premises, security footage says he’s making the jump, so— incoming. I’d give you twenty seconds or so.”

“Got it,” Arthur says tersely.

“You’ve really got to hand it to Yusuf,” says Eames. “That’s a hundred-foot drop right there. Even if he doesn’t drown under the force of all that water, that should kick him right awake.”

“Depends if you see it as a drop or as lateral movement.”

“Your tendency towards the mindfuck is utterly unparalleled, darling. I have no bloody clue how you manage to visualize a Mobius strip with multiple centers of gravity, let alone disguise it as a couple of riverside buildings and make him believe it’s a waterfall.”

“Well,” says Arthur. “When you say it like that, it is kinda headache-inducing.”

He hears a muffled thump against the oak door on the other side of the room.

“Oscar’s fallen through,” he tells Eames.

“Good luck.”

He wrenches open the door, pulls a drenched and halfway-unconscious Oscar through, and sits him on the armchair opposite fake-Eames. Then he slaps Oscar hard across the face.

Immediately, Oscar’s eyes fly open, his pupils dilated. “What the _fuck!”_

“Shut up,” growls Arthur, pressing his Glock 17 into Oscar’s forehead. “What happened down there? Why the fuck are you awake so soon?”

“What’re you—”

Arthur pistol-whips him across the face: a spurt of blood from Oscar’s nostrils. “I’m asking the questions here, fucker! How’d you figure it out?”

Oscar laughs sluggishly. “You think I wouldn’t know? I _know_ they’re onto me, your buddy there ain’t subtle, talking about Mondrian, puttin’ me in the exact same museum I took it from. You dreamcrime assholes think you’re all the _shit,_ don’t you? Hah!” He spits a glob of blood in Arthur’s face.

“Fine, we’ll do this the traditional way,” Arthur says, wiping off his cheek. He flicks the safety off his gun and presses it back into Oscar’s forehead. “Tell me where the painting’s at, now! _Where is it?_ Who’d you give it to, huh? _Tell me!”_

“Fuck off,” Oscar snaps.

Arthur grabs him by the throat. “I know you know, you piece of shit! And we’re not done until you tell me. So unless you want a _bullet in each kneecap,_ you better start talking!”

Oscar just bares his teeth in an ugly snarl and spits at Arthur again.

“Jesus Christ,” Arthur mutters disgustedly, and jams a needle into his neck. Oscar struggles briefly before his eyelids start fluttering. In a minute he’s unconscious.

Arthur taps into his comm. “Eames, you’re up.”

“Right, coming down.”

Sure enough, some time later, Eames steps through the door, mostly dry, and hands Arthur a ticket stub.

“Didn’t notice a thing,” Arthur tells him, pocketing the stub. “Didn’t even stop to think about why his clothes are all wet, that’s how out of it he was.”

“Good,” says Eames, nudging his sleeping projection-self with his foot. “Thanks for the smooth journey, glad I got the river and not the waterfall. I’ll look after Oscar, go have fun.”

“Just make sure he doesn’t wake up.”

Arthur leaves the room and steps back into the atrium. He runs across the space toward a door on the other side, which he exits through and finds himself standing on a small wooden dock. There’s an orange canoe moored to it. He gets in and quickly unties the rope, and the river current takes him smoothly downstream toward the Gutenberg Museum.

With his steady concentration, the boat slides smoothly between every shift in gravity, so that what looks like a waterfall ahead of him is just a perpendicular leg of the river, and soon he washes ashore in front of the museum.

He enters on the right end— LEVEL 6: FRANZ MARC, says the placard next to the gallery entrance. The building’s horizontal relative to the orientation of the river, but as soon as you enter it, the center of gravity shifts and you’re on the bottom floor.

It’s empty inside, which means that Oscar’s projections haven’t discovered the trick behind it: the odd-numbered floors are oriented in one direction, and the even-numbered floors in the opposite direction. Arthur’s designed the stairwells so that each of them gives you access to only one of the two orientations.

He enters the stairwell and climbs up until he reaches LEVEL 4: PIET MONDRIAN.

Once he’s inside the gallery, he spots the painting immediately. It’s the only one of Mondrian’s Compositions to ever use green. Arthur stands in front of it and stares, before reaching out and tracing his fingers along the hidden seams in the black outlines.

He closes his eyes. When he opens them again, the arrangement of cells within the painting has shifted. To reveal a tiny metal safe.

Arthur pulls the ticket stub— Oscar’s admission pass— out of his pocket and types the serial number into the keypad. The safe clicks open.

Inside sits a tiny slip of paper. On it are a name and an address.

“I’ve got it,” Arthur says into his comm. “His fence is in Atlanta.”

“Roger,” Eames responds.

Strains of Edith Piaf begin to echo through the walls.

 

 

It’s stupid of them— maybe they’ve grown complacent. Maybe they’ve grown old.

After the job is done and Arthur’s made a call to Lisa Gutenberg, he and Eames return to his apartment. It’s a stupid, dangerous thing to do, but Arthur doesn’t care.

In the entryway, his face half in shadow, Eames is laughing quietly. A private joke: neither of them have said anything yet.

_But look at me, I’m the only one who gets to see this. I must be the luckiest goddamn man in the world._

“What?” Eames asks. “Why’re you giving me that look?”

Arthur shakes his head and kisses him. And maybe that’s it. Maybe he doesn’t have the words. Maybe that’s all he can do. For now it’s enough, because they’re chest-to-chest, pressed flush against each other, and fuck if that doesn’t take Arthur out of his own mind.

 

 

But oh, maybe some things are supposed to happen.

“Why did you take the Fraser job?” Eames asks once their bodies have quieted, heart rates settled down.

“What, our first one? In December?”

Eames hums.

“Why not? There was nothing wrong with it.” Arthur’s eyes are mostly closed. He can feel a yawn coming on; he prepares to stifle it, but then decides against that.

“You didn’t know that when you took it. I’d barely told you anything before you said yes.” Eames is looking at Arthur, sober-eyed and serious, like he’s forgotten where they are, like at some point in the aftershocks he’d come back to himself enough to remember all the things he was afraid of.

 _Pillowtalk,_ Arthur thinks.

“Mr. Eames.” Arthur traces a finger down Eames’ side. He blinks slowly, once. “No one in this industry double-crosses as much as you do, you know that? I think there’s something to be said about a man who double-crosses a team almost every time he gets the chance and something to gain out of it. And yet you’ve never tried with me, and there were plenty of times where you could’ve, I know. But you didn’t, even when we first met and I was a kid straight out of the Project.”

“You took the job because I _never bloody burned you_? I’d think that’d be your bare minimum for working with someone. You’ve turned down offers for much lesser offenses.”  He pushes a sweaty lock of hair out of his face. “For Christ’s sake, even if you trusted me, you didn’t know if Fraser was legit, or if our mark would be bad— you knew fuck-all about any of it and you still—”

“I trusted your judgement,” Arthur says.

Eames is silent for a while, for so long that Arthur thinks he might be drifting off. But finally he says, hoarsely, “But that was the thing, darling. I hadn't even taken the offer. I'd told Fraser that I needed to think about it. I needed _your_ judgement. I needed you to do the digging. I needed to know that I'd be working with you if I was going to be doing this job at all. I wanted your insight, darling, you have no idea how unbelievably reassuring it was knowing that I had you on the job right off the bat— that’s how I realized that I didn't want to work without you for a long time. That’s why I offered you the bloody partnership. That’s why I bloody called you in the first place.”

“Eames,” says Arthur, just to make sure, “if I hadn't accepted the job, would you have?”

“What would have been the point?” says Eames, almost sadly. “Didn’t need the money, couldn’t offer any worthwhile thrill. Just you, darling.”

So Arthur leans in and kisses Eames, all sweet and slow like it’s their first. He feels the flutter of Eames’ lashes as his eyes slide shut, then the soft press of his lips against Arthur’s.

When they break apart, Arthur says, “You’re in love with me.”

“Would have thought that that was obvious,” says Eames, but his expression is so softly awed, as if he’s feeling the same way Arthur’s feeling right now. Light, a little disbelieving of how lucky he is.

Arthur says, “It is now,” and leans in to kiss Eames again.

 

* * *

 

“Summer, hm,” says Eames.

This is Eames’ Hong Kong apartment: not much more than a bed and a TV and a refrigerator— he’s barely in this city often enough to justify having a place here, or so he tells Arthur. Arthur has been with Eames for long enough to be comfortable now and been something like a friend to him for quite a while longer, but this is his first time here.

(“Unlucky fourth floor,” Eames had explained to him as their taxicab pulled up to the complex. “Landlady had difficulty renting it out, gave me a lovely discount. Beats paying for a month-long stay at a hotel.”)

“Just July and August, I’m thinking,” Arthur says. “I haven’t had a break in a long time. Four, five years.”

“Not since before Cobb, then?” says Eames. “No, I distinctly remember you two taking weeks and weeks between jobs sometimes.”

“Doesn’t count. Recovery periods. And we were always on the lookout for new jobs— frictionally unemployed, if that’s a thing when you’re a freelance dream thief.”

Eames chuckles darkly. “Babysitting Dom Cobb was a full-time job, hm.”

“Shut the fuck up,” mutters Arthur, but he’s grinning too, and a little more genuinely than Eames is.

They’re sprawled out on the living room couch together, Arthur’s head pillowed in Eames’ lap. The TV’s turned on to a BBC news channel, but the sound is nearly muted, the anchor’s voice a vague buzz in the backdrop of the night.

Eames shifts a little under Arthur and says, “Let me up, I need a fag. Want to share?”

“Sure,” says Arthur, sitting up.

They step out onto the small, iron-railed balcony. Eames taps a cigarette out from a box and lights it, taking a drag.

“You’ve got lawn chairs out here,” Arthur says, scoffing lightly.

“Yes,” replies Eames. “Is that strange?”

“It is if you don’t have chairs for your actual kitchen table.”

Eames snorts. “Fair enough.”

It’s quiet for a minute or so as they pass the cigarette back and forth, just the sound of the city below.

Then Arthur says, “You know, I heard Sergio went down last month this way.”

“Sergio was an idiot,” Eames says.

“Yeah, because he did stupid shit like this,” says Arthur.

“Like what? Smoke?”

“No, like sit on a balcony surrounded by high rises without entertaining the possibility of there being snipers hired by the people he’s pissed off.” Arthur takes the cigarette from Eames, fitting his lips around the filter.

“Oh come on,” says Eames. “Neither of us has pissed anyone off in this part of the world. When’s the last time you were in China, even?”

“Any hitman with a decent amount of resources could track you down and get on a plane.”

“We haven’t pissed off anyone _that_ much lately.”

The cigarette is gone now, crushed under Eames’ shoe heel, but they sit out there for a while longer and talk about nothing in particular. The city, the summer, buying a house in LA, the future. When moths start to gather around the balcony light, they go back inside: unshot, unscathed.

And Arthur thinks that maybe he’s found it, the good life. Then he shakes his head and follows Eames towards the bedroom. He’s been out of the Special Forces for so long that he must be going soft.


End file.
